Clovers sluggish in loss to Cadets

Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Cloverdale's Cody Carter collects the Clovers' first hit of the night in the seventh inning of Tuesday's game with Cascade.

CLOVERDALE -- Coming off an 8-7 win over Cascade on Monday, Cloverdale was looking to add another victory Tuesday. However, sluggish play resulted in a 7-3 loss, with head coach Bryan Archer noting his team needed to pick its effort up.

"It all starts with our defense," Archer said. "Pitching -- if our pitching's on, we're a tough team to beat. You're going to have games when our pitchers aren't on and our defense is just going to have to step up and our pitching is going to have to find a way to fight and get outs."

The Clovers struggled early, with their first four batters going down on strikeouts. In fact, Cloverdale wouldn't collect its first hit until the seventh inning and at that point they were playing catch-up.

Cascade started its scoring in the second inning and put up four runs in the third inning, with Alex Arthur hitting a two-run blast to centerfield to help put the Cadets up 5-0. Cascade added a run each in the fifth and the sixth.

In the meantime, Cloverdale was still searching for its first hit. They would get it in the seventh inning when Cody Carter hit a shot to left field. The Clovers came to life after the hit. William Whitinger reached after being hit by a pitch and Will Andersen reached after a Cascade error. The error allowed Carter and Whitinger to cross the plate.

Jordan Brinkman followed with a ground-rule double to centerfield. Ethan Atwood beat a throw to first base that allowed Andersen to score to round out the scoring for Cloverdale.

The Clovers collected only three hits on the Cadets and Archer gave a lot of credit to Cadet pitcher Brandon Blinn for that.

"Give credit to Blinn," Archer said. "He did an excellent job of mixing up his speeds. I think that was probably the biggest issue for us. He mixed up his speeds pretty well, threw decent pitches and we weren't as aggressive early in the counts as I wanted us to be. A good pitcher like that, if you get down, he's going to get you.

"Obviously we can't wait until the seventh inning to try to win a game. It has to be first through seventh inning and we didn't do that tonight at all."

Archer also spoke about the things his team needs to do to be ready to play as soon as the first pitch is tossed. He said it all comes down to being mentally prepared to get the job done.

"That's a mental thing. That's all mental and that's all heart and tonight we didn't have either," Archer said.

Cloverdale is back in action Thursday on the road against Linton Stockton at 5 p.m.

At Cloverdale

Cascade 014 101 0 -- 7 9 1

Cloverdale 000 000 3 -- 3 3 0

WP -- Blinn

LP -- Wilson